1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for improving the quality of data acquired by data acquisition devices. The user can be located locally or remotely from the data acquisition device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data acquisition devices for analog data transform analog data to digital data. A typical example is a scanning device. It takes as input an image printed onto a sheet of paper and outputs a digital representation of the physical image. The quality obtained by the acquisition device depends strongly on using the device with settings that are suited for the specifics of the given analog data. For example, the scanner settings useful to achieve a high quality scanned image of a sunset are rather different from the settings used to scan a picture taken in the broad sunlight of a summer day. Finding better or optimal settings given the specifics of the analog data is a time consuming process that often makes it necessary to acquire the analog data more than once using different settings of the acquisition device. This becomes particularly unpractical and inefficient when the recipient of the digital data and the data acquisition device are at different locations.
The following example illustrates the inefficiency of the current technology. The recipient of a fax is unsatisfied with the quality of the received fax. In order to obtain a better quality fax, the recipient has to, e.g. by using a phone, inform a person located at the origination of the fax and request to resend the fax with different settings.
Furthermore, given temporary analog data, the determination of improved acquisition settings using physical reacquisition of the analog data is either impossible or less feasible within a narrow time frame.
In current remote data acquisition applications, analog data are acquired digitally by using, for example, a scanning device or a digital copy machine. The digitalized data are then sent to a remote recipient via a network. Current methods of remote digital acquisition application do not provide the remote recipient of the acquired data with remote control of the data acquisition device.